


Marooned

by Violsva



Category: Rotkäppchen | Little Red Riding Hood (Fairy Tale)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, F/F, False Identity, Huddling For Warmth, Misses Clause Challenge, Pre-Femslash, Space Pirates, Stranded, Yuletide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-17
Updated: 2018-12-17
Packaged: 2019-09-21 11:57:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17043308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Violsva/pseuds/Violsva
Summary: On a routine supply run to a research station in the Grandmother Nebula, a courier finds the aftermath of a pirate attack, and discovers she's trapped there with the lone researcher until they can be rescued.





	Marooned

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hlae](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hlae/gifts).



> Thanks to CP for betaing, as usual. <3

The first wolf came up on Akane’s sensors halfway to Grandmother Nebula Research Station. She immediately began rerouting her course to avoid ambush points. There were no others showing on the ship’s sensors, but pirates always hunted in packs.

Any other route would add days to her course. Akane cursed and extended the sensors.

Extension lowered the sensors’ accuracy, but there was no sign of any other wolves. Just the one.

 _Was_ it a wolf? The small, battered ship, the attachment points—she squinted at the display. She was pretty sure. If someone had recovered a pirate ship they would have fixed it up better.

Akane shook her head and rerouted as far from the wolf as she could. She had enough calorie packs to take the extra time, and this resupply mission wasn’t desperately urgent.

***

She had thought it wasn’t urgent. When she got within sight of Grandmother Station she was less sure. The station showed up in silhouette against the brightly coloured Grandmother Nebula behind it, but even the silhouette looked a little weird. When she was closer she saw that it wasn’t in much better condition than the wolfship she had seen on the way, especially around the hangar door. If it had been attacked—she really hoped it hadn’t been attacked. There hadn’t been any reports of it when she left, or they would have sent someone more qualified.

But yeah, there would have been reports if it had been. Okay. Anyway, this was a pretty dead area of space, they didn’t have anyone to impress, maybe they’d been too busy with the research stuff to bother fixing up a year’s worth of debris strikes.

Akane was not going to have much to talk about with the maintainer, she already knew. They would be a scientist type with ten degrees, probably, happy to stay out here with only virtual contact with people. Akane was a pilot. She flew places. She did not know astrochemistry.

Hopefully they’d have another power cell ready to go and she’d just be there long enough to stretch out. She signalled her approach and waited for acknowledgement.

Acknowledgement took longer than she expected, but at last she could steer into the hangar space and land. The entry closed behind her, and she waited for atmo to be reestablished in the hangar. It seemed to take ages, but probably because she was suddenly really impatient. That was how it always worked—she didn’t think about how confined she’d been in the cockpit until just before she was allowed to leave.

At last the light and sound systems showed she could exit, and she pressed the door release and almost jumped out. Even in such a small station, the hangar was a relief, after spending over a week in the eight cubic metres of the cockpit. Akane stretched her arms over her head and squinted at the back of the hangar, letting her eyes adjust to real distance again.

“Hey.”

Akane looked up. This must be the station maintainer. She was kind of surprised, for some reason. “Hey. Kishi Akane with the regular supply run,” she said anyway.

The station maintainer was in torn clothes, and looked like she hadn’t slept in days. That was what it was, probably, although that wasn’t always weird, for scientists. And wasn’t it a bit darker in here than it should be?

“Hi,” Akane said when the scientist didn’t say anything.

“I’m Volkova Ylva,” she said. Akane was kind of surprised she didn’t say Doctor Volkova, but she looked Anglo and Anglos were informal like that. She didn’t say anything else, though.

“Are you okay?”

“There was a wolf attack,” Ylva said. “I hid, so they didn’t get me. But I’m completely out of supplies. And power cells. Systems are running at fifty percent right now.”

“Oh my god,” Akane said. “Oh my god, I saw a wolf on the way here but I hoped they wouldn’t have attacked you—you can’t have had much for them to steal in the first place, so close to the supply run.”

“Yeah,” said the scientist. “Yeah, it was a stupid idea. They were really angry.”

“Good thing you hid. Anyway, someone will get your distress signal—you sent out a distress signal, right?—and resupply you and pick me up.”

“Yes.”

“I’ll start unloading.”

She stopped off in the cockpit and sent her own distress signal anyway, because, well, Ylva had looked a bit weird when she mentioned it, and maybe she hadn’t remembered to add that there would be two people in the station until they got here, and anyway another message wouldn’t hurt. Then she unsealed the divide between the cockpit and storage and started unloading.

Ylva helped, which was nice of her, and she was a lot stronger than Akane would have expected. They got everything onto the trolley and into the station.

“Let’s look at the power cells first,” Akane said. “We can replace the station’s with the spare I brought and recharge the others—actually, I’m going to go get mine out of the ship, it’s almost dead, I detoured because of the wolf I saw on the way.”

“Wait,” Ylva might have said, but Akane was halfway into the hangar already so she kept going.

As it turned out there was only the one power cell left in the station’s engine room, which meant Akane would have to stay until hers recharged. “They stole all the rest,” Ylva said. “And this one’s almost dead. I think it’s running out faster than it should.”

“It should be recharging as it runs, in a station this size,” Akane said. “But it’s okay, you’ll have a full one and spares, and that should be fine until someone answers the signal.” She crouched down and started setting up the ship to deal with the interruption in power as she switched the cells out.

Ylva watched as Akane replaced the main power cell, reset the ship, and started plugging the other two into the recharging slots. “Okay,” Akane said. “Those should take three days to charge, and then if you don’t mind only having one spare I can put one back in my ship and go home, so I’m not using up your resources. Okay?”

There was a pause.

“Yes, that sounds good,” said Ylva. “I haven’t been eating for the last few days, can we—”

“Oh my god, I’m sorry! Yes, of course, I’m hungry too, it’s my dinner time by ship time. Show me where the kitchen is.”

Akane took the trolley into the station’s kitchen and grabbed them both protein bars while she figured out how to make something more substantial. Once Ylva had eaten she was a little more talkative.

“Have you been on this station long?” Akane asked.

“No.”

“What did you do before? Just grad school?” She looked old enough that probably she’d done something else in between.

“Actually I used to, uh, fly large scale shipping.”

“Oh, really? I did a few large scale runs before I got the courier position. Did you like it? I wanted more independence eventually.”

“I was captain, so that wasn’t such a problem for me.”

“Yeah, I guess not! Where were you running? What kind of ships?”

They talked about shipping and spaceflight over dinner, and Akane was surprised to find herself enjoying it. Ylva didn’t talk about her studies, and she didn’t talk about her online communities either, as most people in long-term remote assignments did. And she knew a lot about ships.

The station didn’t exactly have guest rooms, but there were fold-out bunks in the main living area, and Akane grabbed her personal stuff from her ship and set up on one of those.

Her ship time was close enough to the station time that she didn’t expect to have problems sleeping, but she woke up sometime at night anyway. She wasn’t sure why—if anywhere was going to be silent at night, a space station with only two people on it should be—and then she saw Ylva crossing the room.

“Hey,” Akane said. Ylva jumped.

“I was just going to the kitchen,” she said.

“Okay. Don’t worry about it, I’m a really light sleeper.”

Ylva took a protein bar from the kitchen and went back to her tiny private room. Akane went back to sleep.

The next three days while they waited for the spares to charge went much faster than Akane had thought they would. She thought she might miss Ylva when she left, and she wanted to get her address. On the third day they went together to the engine room and Akane pulled out the power array.

“Oh no.”

They stared together at the completely uncharged spare cells. “They sabotaged the recharge mechanism,” said Ylva furiously. “Wángba dàn! Otmorozki! Predateli!” She kept going for a bit, but once she stopped speaking Chinese Akane couldn’t understand her. She examined the engine instead.

“It might be something else,” she suggested, but Ylva ignored her and as far as she could tell after she’d looked at it Ylva had been right.

“The main cell hasn’t been recharging either,” she said. “It’s at five sixths. We should switch to half power, at least until we can figure out how to repair it.” Ylva had lived here for at least a year, so hopefully she’d have some idea how it worked.

***

Akane spent the next couple weeks trying to repair the engine. She couldn’t leave anyway, without a charged power cell, so she’d have to either fix it or wait for a response to her distress call. Food wouldn’t be a problem, with the supplies she’d brought, but everything else—light, heat, water and air filtration—was dependant on the power supply. And repair was really not Akane’s speciality. Ylva sometimes helped, but mostly, Akane assumed, she was doing research. She was nice enough not to bore Akane with it at meals, though.

But probably Ylva was getting too nervous for it, because as the days went by she started looking at Akane’s ship. Akane found her in the hangar examining the power setup. Akane kind of wished she wouldn’t, but scientists tended to ignore what you told them until they’d proven it wouldn’t work themselves. On half power, though, it really wasn’t wise.

“Hey, uh, you probably shouldn’t be in here,” Akane said from the hangar door, and Ylva jumped back from the engine. “It forces the station to use a lot of air, and there’s the heating issue. And we can’t use my ship to leave here, it won’t actually take off with more than one person in it, it’s a safety measure. But actually it’d be nice if you’d look over the station engine with me, I’m not sure how to repair it and you know more than I do, right?” She took Ylva’s arm and Ylva followed her to the engine room as Akane explained what she’d tried so far.

“If we can’t repair the recharge mechanism we’re going to have to switch to quarter power soon, but I don’t actually think I can do that on this model without your authorization, so either way we should probably do that while you’re here.”

“Um,” said Ylva, crouching down and starting to look at the power connections.

There was something weird about how she looked at them, Akane thought. Before she’d noticed Akane in the hangar, she’d been calm and confident with the courier ship’s power array, like any pilot, or former pilot in her case, would be. But in the station’s engine room she wasn’t. Her hands were uncertain, and she kept glancing at Akane. As if she didn’t know what she was doing, or was afraid of getting caught.

She’d looked guilty when she jumped back from Akane’s engine, too. But she’d seemed to know it much better than she did the station’s engine. Even though she’d been living here for at least a year before the pirates...

Pirates used lots of single-courier ships, normally heavily modded, like that one Akane’d seen ... alone ... because the others must have been attacking the station...

“You’re a pirate,” Akane said, and Ylva backed out of the engine. Akane stepped away from her.

“What?” Ylva asked, sounding almost calm.

“What did you do with the actual station maintainer?” Akane was shaking a bit. “You’re not her—she’d know what to do to fix the recharge mechanism. Or at least where to start. What did you do to her? Where are the rest of them?”

“I didn’t do anything. There’s no one here but me, Akane.”

“You’re lying,” Akane said. “Where are they? Why are you here?”

“They’re gone.” Ylva was shifting her weight, looking for a way out. Akane stepped forward, blocking her from the door.

“You said you were a captain. You’re _their_ captain, aren’t you? They wouldn’t leave without you.”

“Oh yes they would,” said Ylva. “The traitors mutinied and left me here with nothing except the power cell already in the engine. And then you showed up. I should have just spaced you immediately.”

“You’re a monster.”

“There’d be less load on the systems now, too.”

“Yeah? So are you going to do it? Just hope you can con the rescue rangers when they get here?”

“They aren’t getting here. I didn’t call them. I’m taking the power cell and your ship and—”

“I called them. And if you touch that power cell I’ll—”

Ylva lunged at her, and Akane ducked and tripped her. She was grateful for her jujitsu training for the next few minutes; Ylva was strong, and fought dirty, but Akane held her own. When Ylva landed on top of her Akane bit her arm and shifted her weight and flipped her.

She finally managed to pin Ylva, gasping for breath. She rested her forearm on Ylva’s throat, and Ylva stopped struggling. “What did you do to the station maintainer?” she asked, letting up the pressure just enough, she hoped, that Ylva could talk.

“I didn’t—” Akane increased the pressure for a moment. “My crew did,” Ylva said when she let up. “I picked this target, there was almost nothing here, they spaced her and left me here with nothing, the traitorous mutineers. They’re probably in Xin Shanghai by now.”

“And coming back with weapons?”

“No. Probably not.”

She definitely wouldn’t be able to signal them—non-local signals were the first thing turned off in the switch to half power. That was a relief.

“What are _you_ going to do?” Ylva asked. “You can’t just hold me down here until emergency response shows up.”

“Why should I trust you at all?”

Ylva shrugged, as much as she could. “I haven’t killed you. I could have, and I haven’t.”

“You just said you were going to!”

“And I didn’t.”

Akane stared down at Ylva. But she was right, Akane couldn’t just hold her down, and there was nothing to tie her with, and nowhere in the ship she could lock her in without depriving one of them of a constant water supply.

“You need me,” Akane finally said, hoping she was right. “You clearly have no idea what to do with the station engine. And if you aren’t the station maintainer, you won’t be able to authorize a switch to one quarter power. You’ll run out without me.”

“Yeah.”

“As long as you know it,” Akane said. “I’ll bypass the authorization and reduce the power.” Once the station was on quarter power hangar access would be locked without authorization, so she didn’t have to worry about Ylva escaping with her ship. “And then the emergency responder will show up, and take you into custody.”

Akane hadn’t done anything like the authorization bypass since she was hacking in her spare time in flying school, but she managed it.

At one quarter power the heat lowered significantly and the lights dropped almost all the way, to keep sufficient energy for gravity and air and water filtration. Nonessential rooms were sealed off, so Akane couldn’t avoid Ylva no matter how much she wanted to.

They didn’t speak to each other if they didn’t have to, and Akane told herself she didn’t miss it. Ylva mostly stayed in the tiny private room. The glimpses Akane got in there when Ylva went out for food made her pretty sure that Ylva wasn’t trying to make weapons or anything else, so she let her. _She_ definitely wasn’t going to start any conversations.

***

She woke up shivering. She glanced around the living space, wondering if she’d been woken by Ylva moving around, but she was alone. And cold. The heating was lowered as well as the lights, of course.

Her teeth chattering, she got out of the bed, wrapping the blanket around her, and started collecting everything else blanket-like from the living space. When she had most of them, Ylva’s door opened.

“Oh,” she said, seeing Akane with her arms full of cloth. Ylva’s arms were wrapped around herself too. Akane looked at her. There was a pause.

It would be warmer with two people in a smaller space, Akane thought. Ylva glanced back into her room, and Akane thought she heard her teeth chattering as well. She stepped forward cautiously. Ylva stepped to the side and let her into the bedroom.

Ylva stayed standing awkwardly by the closed door, and Akane spread the blankets onto her bed. She got under the covers, pressing herself close to the wall, and Ylva followed her. Still without speaking, they fell asleep back to back under the blankets, each trying to ignore that the other was there.

Akane woke up much warmer, and then froze when she realized that that was because Ylva was cuddling her.

“I know you’re awake, let me go,” Akane snapped.

“Mmm?” Ylva nuzzled into her neck. Akane wriggled away from her, and Ylva slumped bonelessly to the bed.

She was actually asleep. Akane blinked at her, then adjusted the blanket over her and went to get breakfast. She left a protein bar and a cup of water next to Ylva’s bed.

They slept together from then on, not talking about it. Every morning, Akane woke up warm and cuddled.

Sometimes Ylva woke up at the same time. Akane didn’t want to talk to her, didn’t want to seem like she wanted her there, but it was really unpleasant to get out from under the covers, and Akane was getting used to waking up warm, and something in her fundamentally did not want to pull away and get up, even if she knew Ylva was completely untrustworthy.

It became easier to keep a supply of food and a couple bottles of water in the bedroom, and stay in the small, warmer space most of the time. Once, in the latrine, Akane realized suddenly that now would be a perfect time for Ylva to lock her out of the bedroom somehow, and she rushed back. But Ylva hadn’t jammed the door shut, and Akane realized there was no reason for her to worry if she did. She’d thought of locking Ylva _in_ , earlier. It wouldn’t make any difference until the emergency responder got there. But she didn’t want to be kept away.

***

When there was less than two weeks’ worth of power left, there was a loud ping from the alert system when they were eating lunch, and then the air filtration system whirred as it increased power.

“That’s the visitor signal,” Ylva said, stilling.

Akane went into the engine room and brought up the feeds, squinting until her eyes adjusted to the light. “It’s the emergency responder,” she said. Emergency response was automatically acknowledged by all ship systems, so they wouldn’t need any further clearance to board. She looked at the doorway, where Ylva was standing, and then in the general direction of the hangar. The station rocked a little, as the response ship landed inside. The sounds of the air filtration system shifted.

Akane got up and went to the hangar. She thought Ylva was following her, but she didn’t look until they reached the entrance, just before the atmo finished equalizing and the door unsealed.

The emergency responder was climbing out of her ship. She was Anglo, red haired and heavyset, and she waved at Akane and Ylva as they peered in the door. “You girls okay?” she asked. “I thought I’d just find a messed up single-courier, wasn’t looking forward to chasing that down.”

“Oh yeah,” said Akane, “because I sent the signal, right. The pirates sabotaged the alert system as well as the recharging mechanism.” What was she saying?

“Qín shòu bù rú,” said the responder sympathetically. “You’re the station maintainer?” she asked Ylva.

“She is,” Akane said. “I came with the supply run a week or so after the attack. But, can we both go back with you? We could both use a break.”

“I was going to suggest it,” the responder said. “Easiest way is to take you back to Central space with me and put a repair flag on the station. Sorry if it interrupts your research.”

“I haven’t been able to do much anyway, with the outage,” Ylva said. She and Akane went to pack, and while she shot Akane lots of weird looks she didn’t ask what Akane thought she was doing. Which was good, because Akane had no idea.

The responder dealt with the engine issues enough to let it self-maintain until someone could answer the repair flag, and then urged them back to her ship.

“Closest drop off is Seven Colony,” she said. “That work for you?”

“That’s where I brought the supply run from,” Akane said. She looked at Ylva.

“I guess,” Ylva said, and she stepped up the ramp onto the rescue ship.


End file.
